"You need to tell an adult, Alan," she said, wrapping his new little thumb in gauze she'd taken from her pocket.

"My father knows. My mother knows." He sat with his head between his knees, not daring to look at her, in his nook in the winter cave.

She just looked at him, squinting.

"They count," he said. "They understand it."

She shook her head.

"They understand it better than any adult you know would. This will get better on its own, Marci. Look." He wiggled his thumb at her. It was now the size of the tip of his pinky, and had a well-formed nail and cuticle.

"That's not all that has to get better," she said. "You can't just let this fester. Your brother. That *thing* in the cave..." She shook her head. "Someone needs to know about this. You're not safe."

"Promise me you won't tell anyone, Marci. This is important. No one except you knows, and that's how it has to be. If you tell --"

"What?" She got up and pulled her coat on. "What, Alan? If I tell and try to help you, what will you do to me?"

"I don't know," he mumbled into his chest.

"Well, you do whatever you have to do," she said, and stomped out of the cave.

Davey escaped at dawn. Kurt had gone outside to repark his old Buick, the trunk bungeed shut over his haul of LCD flat panels, empty laser-toner cartridges, and open gift baskets of pricey j.a.panese cosmetics. Alan and Davey just glared at each other, but then Davey closed his eyes and began to snore softly, and even though Alan paced and pinched the bridge of his nose and stretched out his injured arm, he couldn't help it when he sat down and closed his eyes and nodded off.

Alan woke with a start, staring at the empty loops of duct tape and twine hanging from his captain's chair, dried strings of skin like desiccated banana peel fibers hanging from them. He swore to himself quietly, and shouted s.h.i.t! at the low bas.e.m.e.nt ceiling. He couldn't have been asleep for more than a few seconds, and the half-window that Davey had escaped through gaped open at him like a sneer.

He tottered to his feet and went out to find Kurt, bare feet jammed into sneakers, bare chest and bandages covered up with a jacket. He found Kurt cutting through the park, dragging his heels in the b.l.o.o.d.y dawn light.

Kurt looked at his expression, then said, "What happened?" He had his fists at his sides, he looked tensed to run. Alan felt that he was waiting for an order.

"He got away."

"How?"

Alan shook his head. "Can you help me get dressed? I don't think I can get a shirt on by myself."

They went to the Greek's, waiting out front on the curb for the old man to show up and unchain the chairs and drag them out around the table. He served them tall coffees and omelets sleepily, and they ate in silence, too tired to talk.

"Let me take you to the doctor?" Kurt asked, nodding at the bandage that bulged under his shirt.

"No," Alan said. "I'm a fast healer."

Kurt rubbed at his calf and winced. "He broke the skin," he said.

"You got all your shots?"

"h.e.l.l yeah. Too much c.r.a.p in the dumpsters. I once found a styro cooler of smashed blood vials in a Red Cross trash."

"You'll be okay, then," Alan said. He shifted in his seat and winced. He grunted a little ouch. Kurt narrowed his eyes and shook his head at him.

"This is pretty f.u.c.ked up right here," Kurt said, looking down into his coffee.

"It's only a little less weird for me, if that's any comfort."

"It's not," Kurt said.

"Well, that's why I don't usually tell others. You're only the second person to believe it."

"Maybe I could meet up with the first and form a support group?"

Alan pushed his omelet away. "You can't. She's dead."

Davey haunted the schoolyard. Alan had always treated the school and its grounds as a safe haven, a place where he could get away from the inexplicable, a place where he could play at being normal.

But now Davey was everywhere, lurking in the climber, hiding in the trees, peering through the tinsel-hung windows during cla.s.s. Alan only caught the quickest glimpses of him, but he had the sense that if he turned his head around quickly enough, he'd see him. Davey made himself scarce in the mountain, hiding in the golems' cave or one of the deep tunnels.

Marci didn't come to cla.s.s after Monday. Alan fretted every morning, waiting for her to turn up. He worried that she'd told her father, or that she was at home sulking, too angry to come to school, glaring at her Christmas tree.

Davey's grin was everywhere.

On Wednesday, he got called into the vice princ.i.p.al's office. As he neared it, he heard the rumble of Marci's father's thick voice and his heart began to pound in his chest.

He cracked the door and put his face in the gap, looking at the two men there: Mr. Davenport, the vice princ.i.p.al, with his gray hair growing out his large ears and cavernous nostrils, sitting behind his desk, looking awkwardly at Marci's father, eyes bugged and bagged and bloodshot, face turned to the ground, looking like a different man, the picture of worry and loss.

Mr. Davenport saw him and crooked a finger at him, looking stern and stony. Alan was sure, then, that Marci'd told it all to her father, who'd told it all to Mr. Davenport, who would tell the world, and suddenly he was jealous of his secret, couldn't bear to have it revealed, couldn't bear the thought of men coming to the mountain to catalogue it for the subject index at the library, to study him and take him apart.

And he was... afraid. Not of what they'd all do to him. What Davey would do to them. He knew, suddenly, that Davey would not abide their secrets being disclosed.

He forced himself forward, his feet dragging like millstones, and stood between the two men, hands in his pockets, nervously twining at his underwear.

"Alan," Marci's father croaked. Mr. Davenport held up a hand to silence him.

"Alan," Mr. Davenport said. "Have you seen Marci?"

Alan had been prepared to deny everything, call Marci a liar, betray her as she'd betrayed him, make it her word against his. Protect her. Protect her father and the school and the town from what Davey would do.

Now he whipped his head toward Marci's father, suddenly understanding.

"No," he said. "Not all week! Is she all right?"

Marci's father sobbed, a sound Alan had never heard an adult make.

And it came tumbling out. No one had seen Marci since Sunday night. Her presumed whereabouts had moved from a friend's place to Alan's place to runaway to fallen in a lake to hit by a car and motionless in a ditch, and if Alan hadn't seen her --